Publications

Peer Reviewed Publications

2016. “Racial capitalism and the crisis of black masculinity.” American Sociological Review 81(5):1014-1038.

In this article, I theorize “complicit masculinity” to examine howaccess to capital, in other words, making or spending money, mediates masculine identity for un- and underemployed black men. Arguing that hegemony operates around producer-provider norms of masculinity and through tropes of blackness within a system of racial capitalism, I show how complicity underscores the reality of differential aspirational models in the context of severe un- and underemployment and the failure of the classic breadwinner model for black men globally. I draw on participant observation fieldwork and interviews with men from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s informal sector from 2008 to 2009. I investigate two groups of men: political propagandists (orators) for former President Laurent Gbagbo and mobile street vendors. Rejecting racialized colonial narratives that positioned salaried workers as “evolved,” orators used anti-French rhetoric and ties to the political regime to pursue entrepreneurial identities. Vendors, positioned as illegitimate workers and non-citizens, asserted consumerist models of masculinity from global black popular culture. I show how entrepreneurialism and consumerism, the two paradigmatic neoliberal identities, have become ways for black men to assert economic participation as alternatives to the producer-provider ideal.*Honorable mention for the 2017 Oliver Cromwell Cox Article Award for the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minoritiesread

2015. “This is how we roll: Peripheral black masculinity and the status economies of bus portraiture.” Laboratorium 7(2):62-82.

The absence of formal employment opportunities in African citiesleaves many men unable to achieve an idealized, modern wage-earningmasculinity, such that socially they remain boys. They may contesttheir denigrated status by investing in practices that supplant thisdominant narrative of masculinity. Specifically, images of iconicblack men invoke an experience of modernity-as-alterity, shared acrossthe global black diaspora. As men assert their common blacknessthrough visual expression, they fuel lucrative economies. In thistransatlantic interplay, the urban periphery transforms supralocalcultural references into material practices that buttress localidentities. This article introduces the concept of status economies toexamine the politics of representation and to track the dollars anddreams on Africa’s urban periphery. I discuss the practice of gbaka(bus) portrait art as an example of a status economy in Abidjan, Côted’Ivoire. I explore the nexus between gbaka art, changing workregimes, and masculinity to understand how peripheral men’s search forstatus generates a cultural movement and an associated economy.*Extended abstract available in Russian;*Translated in Italian and reprinted in: Forthcoming (2017). A fior di pelle: Razza e visualità. Edited by Elisa Bordin and Stefano Bosco. Verona (Italy): Ombre corte.read – download

In this article I reflect upon my experience as an ethnographer within the informal African city, which I describe as a borderland. In the contemporary African city informality prohibits peripheral men from achieving manhood, predicated on marriage which requires steady work. As perpetual social juniors they fantasize about an elsewhere to which an ever-porous world exposes them but which stands in stark contrast to their lived experiences. Black urbanism (Simone, 2010) situates this mediated experience of elsewhere, an imagined global conceived simultaneously as a space of creativity, possibility and disillusionment through its linkages with members of the black diaspora glorified through not productive but consumption-oriented identities. Positing that we are both borderland figures, I discuss my interactions/intersections with peripheral men in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. I consider how my identity as a woman from the African diaspora entailed a direct encounter with this elsewhere, and how this influenced their lives.*Lead articleread – download

In this article I relate prominent depictions of the African urban crisis, particularly informality, and its implications for masculine subjectivity in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2008 and 2009, I consider the Sorbonne, a nationalist space in Abidjan, where partisans of former President Laurent Gbagbo contested the crisis narrative and their place in it. Literally and ideologically, Sorbonne orators and spectators moved themselves and their country from the periphery to the urban and global core. Video abstract available on Antipode website.read – download

Using barbershop signs in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, I explore images of idealized masculinities that reflect pervasive themes in the lives of marginal Abidjanais men. I argue that men engage in a politics of representation that stresses their likeness to icons from the African diaspora. Global, black and male, the images embody the desires and disappointments of marginal Abidjanais men. Global, the images indicate belonging to the world beyond Africa. Black, the images affirm racialized identities denigrated by colonial domination and mass media hegemony. Male, the images reflect the disproportionately gendered disempowerment that African men experience as a consequence of neoliberal restructuring. Marginal Abidjanais men’s relationship to the global economy having shifted from exploitative to excluded, the images suggest a consumption-oriented masculinity that connects them to global capitalism as consumers but not to their hoped-for families as providers. * Winner of the International Visual Sociology Association Jon Rieger Graduate Paper/Project Awardread – download

2010. “Creating public fictions: The black man as producer and consumer.” The Black Scholar 40(3):36-42.

Engaging prominent theoretical depictions of black men’s struggles to access work, in this article I discuss how black men’s inaccessibility to the American labor market jeopardizes their roles in urban poor communities. Using hip-hop masculinity as a case-in-point, I apply the gender concept of “marginalized masculinity” to these analyses as a modern-day “public fiction” that, through its usurpation by mainstream media and advertising, offers marginalized black men a way to claim dominance within their worlds and encourages participation in America’s economic system, despite it having failed them. In this way black men’s relationship to American capitalism has transitioned from producer to consumer.read – download

Other Academic Publications

Forthcoming (2017). “Africa rising, Afro-pessimism – or racial capitalism?” CODESRIA Bulletin: From renaissance to emergence: How to renew the debate on development in Africa.

2014. “Unpacking the crisis narrative of Black theater.” Pages 228-230 in Figuring the plural: Needs and supports of Canadian and US ethnocultural arts organizations. Project leads/edited by: M.P. Matlon, I. Van Haastrecht and K. Wittig Mengüç. Commissioned and funded by School of the Art Institute of Chicago with support from the Joyce Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.download

Exploration of mobile phone sociability in Abidjan: as display, to counter anonymity of life on the periphery, for dating and to assert a place in social hierarchies. read – download

2013. “Cinematic Sociology.” Interview, GlobalDialogue 3(4):36-38.

Interview with Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand, husband-and-wife team of cinematic sociologists at the University of Evry’s Center Pierre Naville, just outside Paris. GlobalDialogue is the electronic newsletter and magazine of the International Sociological Association, and is translated in fifteen languages.read – download

In this photo essay, I showcase the lives of peripheral Abidjanais men at work and at play. I suggest that men in the informal sector lack visibility as men in their families and communities. To compensate, they find alternative ways of becoming highly visible: via street art, consumer culture and cultural performance. Contexts is the magazine of the American Sociological Association.read – download

Works in Progress

Article. Labor narratives and urban informality in the global South (with Daniel Esser).

Article. Steatopygia as “condition”? Race and the medicalized other.

Book manuscript. Story of a minor term: Racial capitalism and imaginaries of black masculinity from colonialism to crisis.

Ethnographic film. This is how we roll: Black masculinity, visibility, and the status economies of bus portraiture on the African urban periphery.

Public Sociology

May 16, 2017. “The art of domination: On decolonizing the curriculum. Black Perspectives. Blog of the African American Intellectual Historical Society. (Original version published with The Eagle.)read